THE ONE WHERE I AM FINALLY PUBLISHED!

During the week of October 23 to October 29, the key points of this week includes officially publishing my final product from last year, completing my fourth informational interview with a medical geneticist, and also learning about a rare case called situs inversus totalis.

Throughout all of summer, I have worked on transforming my research paper on the fluid mechanics of artificial biological aortic heart valves as well synthetic dacron fiber aortic heart valves. I continued to work with Professor Choi and his PhD student, Yuqi Jin, over the summer to summarize my paper into a format that was suitable for publication. From there, I sent a draft to Dr. Brinkman for checking the medical accuracy of the results that we got from our original experiment. After everyone was able to agree on a final publication draft, we sent it to The Engineering and Science Technology: An International Journal. The journal editors chose our publication draft after reviewing multiple other drafts, and continued to further edit. After nine months of hard work, I am finally published in ESTIJ!

Along with getting published, I was able to complete an interview with Dr. Angela Scheuerle, a medical geneticist at Children's Hospital. Although she was unable to answer all of my questions, I gained a sense of medical genetics from her and learned what this field was about. From there, I proceeded to write an assessment on situs inversus totalis, a rare genetic condition that provides positional variance of the visceral organs inside the body. This interview and assessment gave me perspective on a completely different field of medicine separate from surgery.

In the upcoming weeks, I will be making an official proposal of my idea for original work. Although it has been proven difficult so far, I will also work on obtaining more interviews from medical professionals.